Sinister court moves suffer a setback

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Court circular Healy (foreground, with Slaughter to his right) on WRP march against a police raid on their And the continuation of intervene in the internal life the case rested on the co- of an organisation of the operation of District Court workers' movement and Judge Mariana Pfaelzer, overturn its rules, constiwho admitted that Gelfand tution and leadership. but who herself has a the Bolsheviks split with seamy record of involve- the Mensheviks, one of the ment in approving spying central issues was precisely activities by the Los that of party rules, and thus AN astounding court case has just concluded in the USA, in which a lawyer expelled from the Socialist Workers Party in 1979 unsuccessfully demanded a Federal Court act to reinstate him and remove from the SWP's leadership people whom he alleges are government agents.

The plaintiff, Alan Gelfand, a $30,000 a year attorney in Los Angeles, was expelled after he took court action against the SWP in 1978.

The bizarre behaviour however is not the idiocy of an individual, reactionary, petty bourgeois crank: it is a sinister, wellfinanced, disruptive operation, in which Gelfand admits he has been working hand-in-glove with Gerry Healy's British Workers Revolutionary Party, and its American offshoot, the Workers League.

Since 1975 Healy and his acolytes have waged a slander campaign against the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party, alleging that veteran SWP leader Joseph Hansen had been for 40 years a double agent of the FBI and GPU - and then that Hansen's colleagues and successors in the SWP leadership were also spies and agents. The late Joseph Hansen Organiser March 24, Page 1983, 125, These slanders have been roundly condemned by every self-respecting revolutionary organisation around the world.

Gelfand in 1977 began to raise these very points within the SWP, in close collaboration with the British WRP. In evidence given under oath in pretrial depositions, he admitted that his campaign within the SWP began after England in 1977.

In the summer of 1978, he contacted the WRP's paper, and spoke to WRP Central Committee member Alex Mitchell. Shortly atter that he contacted Healy's leader in the US, Workers League National Secretary David North. In December 1978 he began the legal action against the SWP.

He discussed on as many as six substantial occasions with North up to the time of his expulsion in 1979. Such collaboration with an opponent organisation is clearly in breach of the constitution of the SWP.

Since his expulsion he has met WRP leaders in england in 1980 and 1981, and. admits to over 15 meetings with WL leaders.

From October 1980 onwards he admits to receiving money trom the WL 'to help with the costs of his case" , which in 1980 alone totalled $30,000 in lawyers' fees.

During 1980, 1981 and the first quarter of 1982, Gelfand spent no less than $115,000 simply on legal fees - over and above other expenses including travel and transcript costs.

He admits that he had by then received no less than $40,000 from the WL towards these expenses, while North and two other WL members had been working full-time on his lawsuit as "investigators"

His case is that the SWP is not a legitimate Har Sloan political party since its leadership was taken over by US government agents 40 years ago, and that he was expelled because he sought to expose the agents in the leadership.

Gelfand's panel of witnesses is a motley array of Healyites, cops and narks. They include David North, long-serving WL member Jean Brust, and WRP veteran Cliff Slaughter, along with Los Angeles cops Richey Gibby and Vincent Perizzi, who infiltrated the SWP in the 1970s, and FBI informer Ed Heisler, once a leading member of the SWP.

United These are curious bedfellows indeed for Healy, whose stock response to political opponents is to attempt to portray them as 'police agents' Here - at enormous expense - the WRP and WL constructed a 'united front' with self-confessed cops in an effort to disrupt and destroy an opponent political organisation. THERE is need of a thorough investigation into the links of the Workers Revolutionary Party' (WRP) with various Arab governments.

There is a lot of circumstantial evidence which suggests that the WRP receives substantial sums of money from Libya, and possibly from other Arab governments.

Not long ago it was putting out Iraqi government public relations handouts with imprint of Newsline on them. One glossy Newsline pamphlet, for instance, carried an account of the career of the butcherous Ba'athist dictator Saddam Hussein sycophantic enough to be an . es Derbyshire school in 1975 has no evidence to present, Angeles police against left wing organisations like the SWP.

Mensheviks

What are the 'principles' which Healy and his lawyer friends are claiming to defend? Gelfand is demanding that the court apparatus of the capitalist state In 1903 when Lenin and the type of party that was to be built.

Lenin fought tooth and nail against the Menshevik conception that anyone who chose to do so could regard themselves as a member of the party: he insisted upon a level of political agreement, disciplined political work and financial support as the basis for a revolutionary organisation. Yet the self-styled 'Bolshevik' WRP has urged on and financed a court action by Gelfand in the USA which flouts all of these principles, by seeking court action to impose upon the SWP a "member" who plainly has no agreement with them, has for years acted in defiance of SWP discipline, and whose public legal attacks on the Party have cost it tens of thousands of dollars, and threatened its very independent existence.

As many US trade unionists and labour movement activists realised, if Gelfand and his Healyite backers had succeeded, the precedent would have stood 3B as a threat to every left wing or radical organisaion.

No longer would the membership be able to determine who should or should not be a member or a leader of the organisation: the courts would do that over their heads.

As such, the Healyite action was an. outright attack on the constitutional rights not only of the SWP but the whole American labour movement.

Its complete lack of scruple in invoking the apparatus of the capitalist state against its opponerts in the labour movement is parallelled by the court action for libel being taken by Vanessa Redgrave and the WRP against Socialist Organiser, the costs of which threaten our paper with the prospects of bankruptcy.

SO has consistently argued that the WRP allegations of libel and our defence should be discussed not in the capitalist courts offering a field day for the media witch-hunters but presented to an independent labour movement In the meantime, we face mounting costs as the court deadline looms ever cioser. Donations are urgently needed to the Labour Movement Defence Fund.

LMPDF: c/o 214 Sickert Court, London N1 2SY